Nokia tries to set the record straight on weight in new campaign from TBD

'Know Yourself' campaign highlights brand's smart scale

By

Lindsay Stein

Published On

Jan 18, 2018

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Creative shop TBD, which opened this past fall under industry veterans Rafael Rizuto, Virginia Wang and Jordan Warren, has released a global campaign for its first client Nokia, focusing on the brand's digital health products.

The "Know Yourself" initiative debuted across broadcast, digital and social media on Monday with a spot that features the Nokia Body+ smart scale. In the black and white spot, six men and women of different ethnicities, sizes and body types step on the scale to reveal that they all weight 145 pounds as a voiceover states, "Even when created equal, we are not the same." The video then shows how the smart sale can track many more numbers that make up individual body compositions, such as muscle mass, body fat, water percentage and bone mass.

Rizuto, one of the former 180 LA executive creative directors behind award-winning efforts like Boost Mobile's "Boost Your Voice," UNICEF's "Unfairy Tales" and Expedia's "Dream Adventures," told Ad Age that the spot is an "experiment" as much as it's an ad. Also, the men and women in the commercial were not re-touched or edited after the shoot.

"We're challenging the concept of weight and the scale by showing that people give too much weight to weight and proving that there's so much more than weight," he says. "You may weigh the same as someone else, but your hydration levels, body fat, bone mass and muscle mass are different."

A 30-second version of the spot is airing on national cable and programmatically in the U.S. and in Germany, while digital and social elements of the campaign will run in France and the U.K. as well as the U.S. and Germany. The 60-second spot (featured above) is on YouTube and will be used across a few other digital and internal channels, says Gemini Babla, global head of marketing for Nokia digital health.

Nokia chose to release the first spot in early January because it's the time when people make resolutions, says Babla. However, the brand wants consumers to make resolutions to get healthy overall, not just focus on the number on the scale.

During TBD's design thinking sessions, Wang says the shop talked to experts in both Eastern and Western medicine. One of the key insights that came out of the sessions is that because people are so attached to their devices today, they're very disconnected to their bodies. "No one is aware of what's happening physically until something goes wrong," the former Ideo strategist says. "'Know Yourself' is about re-integration and getting back to a place of appreciating and understanding our bodies."

Babla says the campaign is exciting for Nokia because even though the company has 98 percent global brand awareness, very few people know about its work in the digital health space. "The brand is well-loved globally and is known for innovation in mobile phones, and we want to transfer that equity to consumer products in health," she says.

Next month, Nokia and TBD will come out with another spot for "Know Yourself" focused on its Activity Tracker product. The campaign is expected to run until April.

As part of the initiative, TBD will work with Nokia on social media to drop provocative facts that people might not know about their bodies: having lower body mass index boosts longevity, for example, and good hydration improves bodily function.

"There's so much data now and trivial things that we track about ourselves, but we don't really know ourselves, such as our resting heartrate and what that means to our fundamental health and wellbeing," says Warren, who previously opened two San Francisco shops, Argonaut and Eleven, and worked as a marketing exec at IBM.